Subway

Jacob Lawrence’s early works document life in Harlem, where he moved as a teenager in 1930. There he studied under the painter Charles Alston, first at the Utopia Children’s Center and later at the Works Progress Administration-sponsored Harlem Art Workshop. Through Alston he became acquainted with several leading figures of the Harlem Renaissance. Lawrence cited as a mentor the sculptor Augusta Savage, with whom he also studied and whose work is featured elsewhere in this section. Within a few years of completing this painting, Lawrence created a series of works based on the lives of prominent African Americans, among them Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman. His acclaimed series, The Migration of the American Negro, led to him becoming the first African American artist represented in the Museum of Modern Art’s collection.